Ok...But How??
Jun 20, 2019 • 46 views
LOL, OMG ---we all are quite fond of these text-friendly shortcuts that filled up the modern-day texting world.
But back in the nineteenth century, an abbreviation craze swept entire America with a twist. In those times, it was a humorous attempt to misspell words deliberately and abbreviated them for slang. For example, "KG" that stood for "know to go," is the incorrect version of "no go." The joke is lost today, but it was a LOL stuff in the 1800s.
Likewise, in a beautiful morning, "O.K." appeared in print intending to be the short-form of "oll korrect,” the humorous misspelling of “all correct.” Boston Morning Post editor Charles Gordon Greene, who often wrote witticisms, was likely the author thus, being the man who gave birth to O.K.
O.K. again showed up on Boston Morning Post within three days of its debut. Gradually it seeped into the American vernacular during 1839. By the end of the year, Boston Evening Transcript, New York Evening Tattler, and the Philadelphia Gazette included O.K. in their articles. The spotlight of the next year's presidential campaign, however, set O.K. on the way to linguistic stardom. Harrison won the 1840 election, but so did the term “O.K.”, due to his political organization, called the O.K. Club, but in this case, the letters stood for the birthplace of President Martin Van Buren--Old Kinderhook, N.Y.
While O.K. metamorphosed into an omnipresent expression in the famous English lexicons, its origins were disputed for more than a century. Over the years, a handful of explanations came up. Some proposed that it originated from the Native American Indian tribe Choctaw's word "okeh."
Others argued that it might be a part of the Wolof languageof Sub-Saharan Africa. David Dalby first claimed that the particle "O.K." could have African origins in the 1969 Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture.
But the most celebrated one was that of the article produced by the eminent etymologist Dr. Allen Walker Read (1906-2002) who proposed the origin as mentioned above that we discussed majorly in this piece.
Could anyone think of this??
It's O.K. if you didn't.
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